Startup on a shoestring: building the MVP

“You may be a business man or some high-degree thief,
They may call you doctor or they may call you chief,
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody”.

Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan is not known as a business advisor but his words are worth pondering.

A startup may be your dream, your personal pain point, your vision but unless you find enough people to say “yes, we share this pain too” and “yes, we will pay for the pain to go away”, there will be no startup beyond your dream. This is where building the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) comes in.

An MVP, as founders will know, is a bare-bones prototype that can be used to test if the dream should remain a dream or if some elbow grease may help its realisation. Its value in getting early adopters in is significant.

Early adopters are different beasts, psychologically speaking, from later adopters. They get your drift, your vision; they will use a less than perfect product and give you feedback; and you will gain several things. You will gain some early champions, you will get to see how the product works in the hands of actual users not just the people who designed it and how it needs to change, and you will get a better idea of what you need by way of talent to drive the startup.

Open source tools and cloud services enable quick building up of MVP for web based services. But not all startups are building web services or apps. How does one build an MVP for a physical product? As the following examples show, the web can be immensely useful in these contexts too.

Svaha-USA makes STEAM-themed clothing for children. Some mums asked them for STEAM themed dresses. Before swinging into action based on some feedback. Svaha-USA chose to test the wider market by setting up a crownfunding campaign for their first such collection. Not only was the campaign oversubscribed, they built a new following and now STEAM themed dresses for mothers are an integral part of their offering.

The founders of Onnix Bags in London, aiming to offer customisable, handcrafted bags at affordable prices, started by building a community first. Practising artist Austin Kleon’s advice, Show Your Work, they shared their process of design and building supplier relations with the community. This community came through in a big way when they ran their crowdfunding campaign, and you guessed it! They benefited other founders in their community by sharing in great detail how they went about their campaign. Where markets are finicky and unforgiving, such as in fashion and personal goods, building an MVP could go hand-in-hand with early marketing and brand building as Onnix successfully did.

Similarly, Que Bottle, the Bay Area based makers of collapsible, food grade silicone bottle, tested the concept in a secret but global group of founders, before launching their crowdfunding campaign which was swiftly successful.

You may have noticed the emerging theme here. To ease the path to success, it helps if one is plugged into the entrepreneurship ecosystem, and both ask for help and share your learnings. While entrepreneurship ecosystems may differ slightly in their cultural origins, the core values of paying it forward and helping one another are notable in both the Silicon Valley and London ecosystems. As the Indian entrepreneurial ecosystem matures, these values are already taking hold and helping strengthen the ecosystem.

Many founders see themselves as outliers or iconoclasts. But in reality, most of us are ordinary with extraordinary dreams. That iconoclast bit is true only for a minuscule number. And even those would benefit from knowing about, joining, and participating in the local founder ecosystem. Many ideas are tossed around in these communities, but only some make it to the MVP stage and even fewer become successful businesses. There is, of course, no better cure for founder loneliness, more on which later in this series, than to see a whole community, who understands you and empathises with your pain and helps you deal with it.

There are two angles to the startup on a shoestring budget. This column focused on building an MVP before going big, the existential aspect of building a startup on a shoestring budget. In a later column we will discuss how founders can keep costs low.